I have been doing a fair bit of reviewing, particularly of suggested edits in the last week, since the Review Tasks (beta) went live. Partly to get a better feel for the rejection reasons and partly because I like to know the outcome, I’ll often review the suggestions to see which way people voted and what the final decision was. Whilst doing this, I’ve noticed a pretty large variation in the approve/reject rates for users. Taking the top 5 from the suggested edits stats for example you have:

Maybe some users have been really lucky and only seen good suggestions but the variation is significant enough that it feels like there is a bigger issue. Is this really an issue and if so, is there a way to address it? One way might be to raise the profile a bit by putting something like (% suggested edits approved / % suggested edits where approval was contested) on the users main summary page. My current approval rate is 52%, which is low, particularly based on the accepted answer to this question.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that if I take the time to validate an edit (by going to the relevant question to confirm that information has been moved up from comments for example) then the time taken to do this can result in a decision being made one way or the other while I’m doing that. Is there some kind of lock placed on edits that are being reviewed to reduce the likelihood of this happening and if not, would it be beneficial? I think a lock for even just 1-2 minutes would be sufficient to allow time and encourage the edit to be properly checked without really impacting the length of the suggested edit queue. Now that more people have access to it, I’ve rarely seen it go much into double figures.

I'm also the opinion that too much crap gets approved (anyone can remember that spam-suggested-edit that got approved by high-reps?), but I also agree with the comment from Jeff on the other question: "the existing text is quite clear; what we can't change is human nature: some people have a Mother Theresa complex and want to help everyone, all the time at any cost, and they'll always believe every byte of any proposed change is sacred. shrug"
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Time Traveling BobbyJul 24 '12 at 10:20

8

Before this, I had time to slowly improve the edit, which only made minor changes to the post, and uncheck the helpful checkbox. Nowadays, such edits gets accepted while I was editing half way.
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nhahtdhJul 24 '12 at 10:27

One way to get a high percentage is to approve the obvious ones, and pass on the more difficult edits. It doesn't have to mean that you accept everything.
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Bo PerssonJul 24 '12 at 12:58

@BoPersson: That's a really good point and one that I use sometimes on the close vote queue (I tend to avoid duplicates unless I have time to really check they're duplicates). I guess that's what I'm trying to cover with the idea of '% contested approval'. If you only approve the easy edits you'd expect the number of contested votes to be low. I'm not suggesting that a highly contested rate would always be bad, but if you know that your rate is high it may encourage you to think about whether or not you're too far on one side or other of the gray line.
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forsvarirJul 24 '12 at 13:32

I think the stat is also probably skewed slightly by posts where people have clicked to 'improve', since these seem to come through as Community approvals so don't exactly appear on the approvers record. There does seem to be less gray with some edits, but I've also seen some edits that have gone one way or the other (usually approved) which really felt like users were rushing to get their review done. This is perhaps a side effect of the review queue suddenly being visible to so many people that have rarely had the opportunity to approve posts in the past.
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forsvarirJul 24 '12 at 11:11